17 May 2012 5:40 PM

Michael Gove is a brave and brilliant man, but handing head teachers the freedom to set staff pay is pointless

I have no doubt that the teaching unions are one of the biggest impediments to school reform. They should be taken on. But is Michael Gove - or indeed - the Coalition really up for it?

It is an old adage that you should only pick the battle when you can win. You should certainly only pick those worth fighting.

One worth fighting would have been facing down OFSTED over unannounced school inspections. Michael Gove could have won that. Especially if Sir Michael Wilshaw, in whom Gove places so much trust, had lined up behind him and lived up to the esteem accorded him. But maybe this was another of the ‘trade offs’ that are the hallmark of Coalition Government, where principle is jettisoned.

Maybe Mr Gove's decision to expand, not close, that most useless and hubristic of quangos, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, was another such. As Jill Kirby asked in her incisive blog on Conservative Home yesterday, “Would Michael Gove, if acting alone, have appointed John Dunford (a vocal opponent of free schools) or succumbed so readily to the “children's rights” lobby? Wouldn't sheer common sense have informed him of the fallacy of assuming that one man (or woman) should have the power to speak for 11 million children?”

We can but wonder.

For now we are lumbered with an OCC that will “promote and protect children's rights”; will have the power to carry out “impact assessments” of government legislation and policies, to see how they affect children's rights. And Government and public services will be obliged to respond to the Commissioner's reports. We are lumbered with a six-year-term Commissioner (rather than five as at present). More - not less - bureaucracy; less - not more - responsiveness to children’s real needs.

These were the fights he could have and needed to pick; not headmasters’ freedom to set staff pay.

It is not just that the NUT is raring to take him on (any excuse would do); though by the sound of Christine Blower’s comments in the paper today she cannot wait to join battle - to turn this into a cause celebre for victimised teachers, “already suffering from pay freezes, job losses and increases in pension contributions” - and now, thanks to Mr. Gove, to suffer from pay cuts too.

The fact is that they won’t suffer pay cuts. Not for this reason anyway, but because this whole idea is a non-starter that Mr. Gove should never have been put up to.

Not that the idea is not right in principle. It is. But in practice, hardly any schools will avail themselves of this freedom. Academies already have it. It has made very little difference.

Quite simply, heads have enough problems without having to determine teachers' pay and deal with the resultant moaning.

In any case, the pressure on teachers' pay is strongly downwards. There is a vast oversupply of teachers now – something the unions have remained quiet about. Maybe they don't want to upset the teacher training industry, along with themselves, one of the most ideological outposts in education.

Teachers are already taking pay cuts to get jobs – but do the Unions want to know? Are they that keen to look after their members?

In this environment it is hardly likely that head teachers will be bidding for the top teachers. They are more likely to appoint newly-qualified teachers shaky on their subject matter for £25,000 than an experienced teacher who knows his stuff on £40,000. Let’s face it, many teachers earn far more than that at the good public schools anyway. Nor will heads risk hiring at that level of pay unless they are free to fire at will too.

This is gesture politics, and the DfE must know it.

So the question is how far Michael Gove is being sucked into their socialist mentality; their bankrupt ‘equalising’ agenda; into ideologies that have entrenched inequality rather than liberated pupils?

If his speech to Brighton College last week was anything to go by, Mr Gove seems to have fallen for at least some of it - one aspect of which is that the Independent schools unfairly mop up the best teachers.

At best, he appears to think that school reform is a matter of getting Eton’s teachers to decamp to state schools; that if the best teachers could be persuaded to move to the inner cities all would be well. Hence state heads need the freedom to set pay.

But short of a Maoist revolution, the idea is unrealistic. It is also fundamentally the wrong strategy. Most good teachers would not contemplate it. They would rather leave the teaching profession.

Why does Michael Gove think they chose to teach in the independent sector in the first (or second, after a bad experience) place? It is not just a question of pay. Frances Childs' disturbing account of her total disempowerment (in these columns last week) in a school environment devoid of authority and respect, where she was slighted, abused and bullied by children and their parents, would be enough to put any right-minded teacher off.

No matter how high-minded they are, would not they crumble, like Frances, under this pressure - however good they are at teaching?

Michael Gove is committed to equalising opportunities for children. It is a laudable goal. But his strategy (free schools apart) limits those very opportunities.

Although he may well alleviate some of the worst features of contemporary schooling, he has staked far too much on the academies programme. It merely transfers control from Local Authorities to the Department for Education. And new buildings aside, the newly-named academy is not so different from the 'comprehensive' that went before or the ‘Village College’ or secondary modern before that.

We need to see Mr Gove encouraging the expansion of the independent education sector, providing vouchers and scholarships for needy pupils and encouraging low-cost providers.

He should take a lesson from Ray Lewis’s extraordinary achievement at East Side Young Leaders Academy in getting 12 boys from the most deprived of backgrounds in Newham into three of Britain’s top public schools – Rugby, Eton and Christ’s Hospital. Yes they passed all the requisite exams and won bursaries. And they are flying. But with vouchers more could win places and more places could be made.

Mr Gove has not, strangely, given his own aspirant parents, ‘read’ parents’ aspirations for their children – whether middle, working or underclass - or responded to their wishes for their children – parents who would give anything to be able to afford independent education for them. Parents who will uproot to one of the few areas served by a grammar school – just in the hope their child might win a rare place. He has not even backed their return.

The education secretary seems to think that independents should provide more bursaries. But that only serves to freeze out the middle-class parents who can barely afford to pay twice for their children's education, and cannot possibly afford to pay thrice.

The trouble is that anyone sticking their neck out for aspirational parents such as these will surely get it chopped off, or treated with derision by the defenders of unearned privilege.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.